Where is that noise coming from? Not sure? Try living with your eyes closed for a few years.

Blind people are better at locating sounds than people who can see, a new study says, without the benefits of vision the ears seem to work much better.

Previous studies have shown that blind people are better than others at reaching out and touching the sources of sounds that are close by. Researchers from the University of Montreal wanted to see if blind people were also better at locating sounds that are far away.

Twenty-three blind people participated in the study. All had been sightless for at least 20 years. Fourteen of them had lost their vision before age 11. The rest went blind after age 16. The experiment also included 10 people who could see but were wearing blind-folds.

In one task, volunteers had to pick the direction of a sound coming from about 3 metres away. When the sound was in front of them or slightly off center in front, both groups performed equally well.

When sounds came from the side or the back, however, the blind group performed much better than the blindfolded group. The participants who had been blind since childhood did slightly better than those who lost their sight later.

Recognizing the locations of distant sounds can be a matter of life-or-death for blind people, say the researchers. Crossing the street, for instance, is much harder when you can’t see the cars coming.

Still, the researchers were surprised by how well the blind participants did, especially those who went blind after age 16. In another experiment, the scientists also found that parts of the brain that normally deal with visual information became active in locating sound in the people who were blind by age 11. These brain parts didn’t show sound-location activity in the other group of blind people or in the sighted people. The scientists now want to learn more about the working of brains of “late-onset” blind people.

68. The recent study shows blind people are better at telling ________________.

A. The sources of loud sounds.           B. the locations of distant sounds

C. the direction of sharp sounds           D. the distance of a sound in front of them

69. Which would be a proper title for the passage?

A. A Research on Blind People        B. Where is That Noise Coming from?

C. Hearing Better in the Dark         D. What If Living Without Your Eyes?

70. If people were asked to tell the direction of a sound from the side, who would perform best?

A. Those who are blind.            B. Those who have gone blind since children.

C. Those who went blind at age 16.          D. Those who are blindfolded.

71. Which of the following is true according to the passage?

A. Whether to be able to locate the sounds can be of vital importance for the blind.

B. All the volunteers in the experiment are sightless.

C. All the participants did equally well when picking sounds from whatever direction.

D. The later people become blind, the better they can perform in telling the direction of sounds.

We typically associate the word “science” with a person in a white coat doing experiments in a laboratory. Ideally, experiments should play as big a role in the human sciences as they do in the natural sciences; but in practice this is not usually the case. The are at least three reasons for this.

1．Human scientists are often trying to make sense of complex real world situations in which it is simply impossible to run controlled experiment.

2．The artificiality of some of the experiments that can be conducted may make the behavior of the participants abnormal.

3．There are moral reasons for not conducting experiments that have a negative effect on the people who participate in them.

Faced with the above difficulties, what are human scientists to do? One solution is to wait for nature to provide the appropriate experimental conditions. We can, for example, learn something about how a normal brain functions by looking at people who have suffered brain damage; and we can gain some understanding into the roles played by genes and the environment by studying twins, who have been separated at birth and brought up in different families. In the case of economics, economic history can provide us with a bank of-admittedly not very well-controlled-experimental data.

However, human scientists do not just sit around waiting for natural experiments to arise. They also think of some experiments of their own. Suppose you want to know how a baby sees the world. We cannot, of course, ask the baby since it has not yet learnt to speak. So it might seem that all we can do is guess. People usually won’t change their mind until it was found out that babies tend to stare at surprising things longer than at unsurprising ones. This key understanding was like opening a window on to the developing mind. There was now a way of testing babies’ expectations and getting some idea of how they are six months old, babies can already do the following things: figuring out that objects consist of parts that move together being aware of the difference between living and non-living things and even doing simple arithmetic work.

1.What is true about the natural sciences and the human sciences according to this passage?

A．Both human scientists and natural scientists can run controlled experiments.

B．Experiments done by human scientists and natural scientists are artificial.

C．Both human and natural science experiments should be of the same importance.

D．It’s not moral to conduct human science experiments.

2.What do we know about human scientists from this passage?

A．They are white coat scientists.

B．They have more experimental sources than natural scientists.

C．They conduct experiments passively.

D．They face more difficulties in carrying out their research.

3.Which of the following experiments belongs to human science experiment?

                    for a fun and easy science experiment. Try creating a

B．                  Taste Without Smell Put your senses to the test

                     with this simple experiment that shows the

importance of your sense of smell.

                     your lung volume by completing this experiment.

D．                 Make a Rainbow Use sunlight and water to

that will teach kids how rainbows work while they

enjoy a fun activity

4.What does the author tell us in this passage?

A．ABCs about the science experiment.

B．Some knowledge of science.

C．Some differences between the human sciences and the natural sciences.

D．The similarity of the natural sciences and the human sciences.

Psychologists(心理学家) have known that what's going on inside our head affects our senses. For example, poorer children think coins are larger than they are, and hungry people think pictures of food are brighter. Professor Remi Radel wanted to investigate(look into) how this happens -- whether it's right away, as the brain receives signals from the eyes, or a little later, as the brain's higher-level thinking processes get involved.
Radel chose 42 students and each student was told to arrive at the lab at noon after three or four hours of not eating on the day of the test. Then they were told there was a delay. Some were told to come back in 10 minutes; others were given an hour to get lunch. So half the students were hungry when they did the experiment and the other half had just eaten.
For the experiment, the participant looked at a computer screen. One by one, 80 words flashed on the screen. A quarter of the words were food-related. After each word, the person was asked how bright the word was and asked to choose which of two words they'd seen -- a food-related word like gateau (cake) or a neutral (中性的) word like bateau (boat).
Hungry people saw the food-related words as brighter and were better at identifying food-related words. Because the word appeared too quickly for them to be reliably seen, this means that the difference is in perception (直觉), Radel says—it's not because of some kind of processing happening in the brain after you've already figured out what you're looking at.
"This is something great to me, that humans can really realize what they need or what they hope for, to know that our brain can really arrange for our motives and needs," Radel says. "There is something inside us that selects information in the world to make life easier.”
【小题1】The purpose of Radel's research is to let us know ____.

Recently, university students around the world were asked to volunteer in a global experiment called Unplugged. It was designed to see how young people would react if they were asked to observe a total media ban by unplugging all forms of media devices for 24 hours．
Unplugged is being run by Dr. Roman Gerodimos, a lecturer in Communication and Journalism at Bournemouth University．During the experiment, Dr. Gerodimos said there were already signs of how much the exercise affected volunteers．He said：“They’re reporting withdrawal symptoms, overeating, feeling nervous, isolated and disconnected．”
During their 24-hour test, three of the experiment’s participants were followed around by a BBC reporter plus cameraman．They were asked to write down 100 lines about their day offline, but of course, they all waited until the next day when they had access to their laptops．
Elliot Day wrote：“Today, my whole morning routine was thrown up into the air．Despite being aware of the social importance of the media, I was surprised by how empty my life felt without the radio or newspapers．”
From Caroline Scott, we read：“I didn’t expect it, but being deprived of the media for 24 hours resulted in my day-to-day activities becoming so much harder to carry out than usual…I didn’t break out in a cold sweat like our lecturer expected us all to, but It’s not something I would like to do again！”
And Charlotte Gay wrote：“I have to say the most difficult item for me to be without has been  my mobile；not only is it a social device, it’s my main access point of communication．”
Earlier in the year, a UK government study found that in the UK we spend about half our waking hours using the media, often plugged into several things at once．So, with technology continuing to develop at an alarming rate, how much time will you set aside for sleep in the future?
【小题1】What can we learn about the volunteers?